As
we saw yesterday, Aquinas gave the same name — “legal justice” — to the general
virtue Aristotle described, and to
the particular virtue that he, Aquinas, mentioned in passing. Obviously this is a little confusing. Having one name for two different things
tends to lead to errors, e.g., using
the word “man” to mean both a human being and
the human race, or “property” to mean both the right to be an owner and the bundle of rights that define how
an owner may exercise his or her ownership.
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| Pius XI: Change is in order. |
Socialism, in
fact, relies on this kind of “fallacy of equivocation” — which was probably one
of the reasons Pope Pius XI decided a change was in order. It is, after all, pretty hard to talk about
something new when people are absolutely convinced you’re talking about
something old.
Pius XI therefore
restricted the “general” type of legal justice to Aristotle’s meaning. He then gave “particular” legal justice a new
name — “social justice.” The term social
justice had been around for a while, but it didn’t have a philosophical
definition. It seems to have been used
to describe acts of individual charity on a wide scale, and to justify
socialist redistribution by changing the definition of charity (a voluntary
act) to justice (which can be coerced).
As for the
common good, Pius XI clarified Aquinas’s thought by pointing out that, as
“political animals” (in Aristotle’s phrase), in the ordinary course of events,
human beings by nature acquire and develop virtue in a social context. We do not, however, lose our individual
identities. We become instead “more
ourselves” as we were truly meant to be.
As human beings we have a kind of binary existence — we are both
individuals as individuals, and
individuals as members of groups, or social units or “institutions” within the pólis.
The common good therefore
manifests itself concretely as the network of institutions — formal groups —
within which human beings as social creatures acquire and develop virtue. Social justice is the “particular virtue”
that has the job of making certain that our institutions actually do this
within a reasonable degree of tolerance.
If an institution needs reform, social justice (as the virtue concerned
with the just ordering of the common good) commands that we reform that
institution.
Other things are
involved as well. The principle of
subsidiarity (you knew we’d get back to that eventually), for instance,
dictates that the most appropriate persons at any level of the common good —
those “closest” to a situation — are primarily responsible for it. If they need help, they go to the next
highest level of the common good . . . but only after they have tried to solve
their own problems through their own efforts.
Solidarity, a
characteristic of groups as groups, is another critical concept. Solidarity consists of the understanding and
internalization of whatever principles define a group as that particular group
and no other.
The Reconciliation
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| Aristotle: man is by nature a political animal. |
The whole
discussion on social justice is, in essence, the effort to reconcile two
universal principles of moral philosophy that are among the foundations of the
proper and appropriate application of the precepts of the natural law. These are that “Man is by nature a political
animal,” and, “Only man, the human person, and not society in any form is
endowed with reason and a morally free will.” (Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, § 29.)
Inevitably, however,
commentators and other experts with odd combinations of individualism and
collectivism reject one or both of these principles. The individualist rejects the notion that our
social nature is truly part of our nature.
The collectivist insists that our social nature is our only nature, and that free will and
individual sovereignty are a myth.
Understanding social virtue, particularly social justice, is the only
way to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory principles.
For any social
activity, action must proceed according to the “laws” of social justice. Social justice is the “particular” virtue
that has the common good as its directed object (or, as philosophers would say,
“material cause”). The “common good”
includes — but is not limited to —
“general welfare.”
The common good
is not collectivism. By far the greater and more important part of
the common good is the complex network of institutions within which the human
person interacts with others and carries out daily life — those vast milieux
within which the human person acquires and develops individual virtue.
#30#
